Art for Ukraine

‘I paint these portraits knowing that these women are not perfect. They are vulnerable, they do not pretend to be examples and I admire them even more for that, because I too know what it is to struggle, to learn, to evolve, to be imperfect.’ – Chechu Álava

For the last decade, Álava has produced an ongoing series of paintings and portraits that seek to unify and align the depictions of ancient and mythological female protagonists with that of modern and contemporary feminist icons, female intellectuals, writers and artists.The artist asks those who encounter her works to consider resituating these women outside of a patriarchal lens and the constructs that pervade the history of art where depictions of women have, more often than not, only reflected male desire. 

In The Therapy,  Álava explores the way in which women’s thoughts and emotions have traditionally been perceived throughout a male dominated canon of history. The scene portrayed by the work, a Freudian psychoanalytic session, is a loaded representation of the arena in which which ‘female emotional hysteria’ was diagnosed, scrutinised, and tamed by the intervention of the male psychoanalyst. 

Álava obtained her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Salamanca in 1996 and was awarded the Erasmus Scholarship to study at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in 1995. In 2020 Álava presented her first major museum exhibition, Rebeldes, at the Thyssen Museum in Madrid, Spain, which was accompanied by an artist’s monograph. Álava’s work is represented in institutions such as the Museo de Bellas Artes de Asturias, DKV Art Collection Spain, the Ministry of Culture (Spain) and in private collections in Mexico, France, Colombia, Germany, Portugal, the United States, South Africa, South Korea and Spain. In 2014, her work was selected by an international jury to be included in 100 Painters of Tomorrow, a book published by Thames and Hudson.

Exhibition History
The work featured in Chechu Alava’s solo exhibition A Timeless Story at Cob Gallery, London (3 February - 5 March 2022).

http://www.chechualava.com/
@chechualava

The work is a generous donation from Cob Gallery. 
© Text + Image @cobgallery